The Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) in the UK: Investigating demographic changes in the family and advancing online survey methodology

在过去的几十年里，英国的家庭生活发生了迅速的变化。与此同时，经济和政治不确定性增加，影响了就业稳定和社会流动性。新冠肺炎疫情给家庭带来了前所未有的压力，它限制了经济资源，重组了家庭照顾孩子的方式，并暂时停止了社交生活。年轻人受到的打击尤其严重，面临失业、住房困难和经济早熟的比例更高。这些情况引发了年轻人和中年人如何组建家庭、维持伴侣关系以及做出生育决定的问题。了解社会、人口和生殖行为需要详细、高质量的数据。该项目建议收集英国版的全国代表性世代和性别调查(GGS)。GGS是世代与性别方案(GGP)的主要成果之一，GGP是由欧盟委员会支持的国际研究基础设施。在过去的20年里，GGP收集了欧洲和其他25个国家的调查数据(www.ggp-i.org)。GGS从未在英国进行过，许多跨国比较中都忽略了英国。GGP发起了新一轮的调查GGS2020，以了解过去20年来家庭的变化。已获得在10个国家收集数据的资金，8个欧洲国家以及香港、澳大利亚和美国的申请正在等待中。财团董事会已经开发了该仪器，并对数据收集方法进行了微调。这项在线调查将使用具有全国代表性的抽样框架进行收集。这种数据收集代表着物有所值，因为大部分调查成本都花在了激励措施上，这些激励措施将回报给英国公众。英国GGS将填补有关成年早期和中年(18-59岁)的国际可比信息的空白，这将补充现有的英国数据来源。国家统计局的数据没有反映家庭事件的复杂性及其与其他生活领域的相互关系。队列研究在很大程度上忽略了70年代、80年代和90年代出生的人，他们经历了最剧烈的就业和家庭变化。了解社会是家庭和家庭信息的重要来源，但对2010年后年轻人行为的估计是有偏见的。目前的调查还低估了单身母亲、分居家庭和混合家庭的比例。因此，英国需要一个全面的数据来源来调查新千年的家庭。GGS2020调查问卷旨在测试人口统计学理论，并解决新出现的社会挑战，如人生历程不平等、经济不确定性、性别平等和工作家庭平衡。该调查具有实施特定于英国的问题的灵活性，例如对英国退欧的态度。重要的是，调查将包括与冠状病毒大流行有关的问题。英国GGS将是一个独特的资源，用于了解人们如何应对病毒的影响，以及对行为的长期影响。除了数据收集，该项目还将包括方法和人口统计工作包。方法学工作包将评估数据质量、代表性、激励性实验以及概率抽样和配额抽样之间的比较。这些分析将深入了解在线数据收集的准确性，从而改进设计和实施。人口统计工作方案将使用伙伴关系和生育率数据来调查过去20年英国家庭形成的趋势。该工作包将在整个新冠肺炎中研究生育意图，从而揭示英国将经历婴儿潮还是婴儿潮。

Family life in the UK has been rapidly changing over the past decades. Simultaneously, economic and political uncertainty has increased, impacting employment stability and social mobility. The Covid-19 pandemic has placed an unprecedented strain on families, by limiting economic resources, reorganising how families care for children, and temporarily halting social life. Young adults have been particularly hard hit, with a higher percent facing unemployment, difficulties with housing, and economic precarity. These conditions raise questions about how young and middle-aged adults are forming families, maintaining partnerships, and making decisions about childbearing. Understanding social, demographic, and reproductive behaviours requires detailed, high quality data. This project proposes to collect the UK version of the nationally representative Generations and Gender Survey (GGS). The GGS is one of the main outputs of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), an international Research Infrastructure supported by the European Commission. Over the past 20 years, the GGP has collected survey data in 25 countries in Europe and beyond (www.ggp-i.org). The GGS has never been conducted in the UK, omitting the UK from many cross-national comparisons.The GGP has launched a new round of surveys, GGS2020, to understand how families have been changing over the past two decades. Funding has been secured to collect data in 10 countries and applications are pending in 8 European countries, as well as Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States. A Consortium Board has developed the instrument and fine-tuned the data collection methods. The online survey will be collected using a nationally representative sampling framework. This data collection represents value-for-money, as the majority of survey costs go to incentives that will be returned to the British public. The UK GGS will fill a gap in internationally comparable information about early adulthood and mid-life (ages 18-59), which will complement existing UK data sources. Office for National Statistics data do not capture the complexity of family events and their interrelation with other life domains. The cohort studies largely miss those born throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, who have been experiencing the most intense employment and family changes. Understanding Society is an important resource for information on families and households, but estimates of the behaviours of young adults after 2010 are biased. The current surveys also underrepresent lone mothers, separating, and blended families. Thus, the UK needs a comprehensive source of data to examine families in the new millennium.The GGS2020 questionnaire was designed to test demographic theory and address emerging social challenges, such as life-course inequalities; economic uncertainty; gender equality and work-family balance. The survey has the flexibility to implement UK-specific questions, for example attitudes towards Brexit. Importantly, the survey will include questions about experiences with the coronavirus pandemic. The UK GGS will be a unique resource for understanding how people are coping with the fall-out from the virus, and the longer-term impact on behaviour.Besides data collection, the project will include methodological and demographic work packages. The methodological work package will assess data quality, representativeness, an incentive experiment, and a comparison between probability-based and quota sampling. These analyses will provide insights into the accuracy of online data collection, allowing for improvement of design and implementation. The demographic work package will use the partnership and fertility data to investigate trends in family formation over the past two decades in the UK. The work package will study fertility intentions throughout Covid-19, shedding light on whether the UK will experience a baby boom or bust.